Toronto city planners’ best strategy for dealing with winter seems to be crossing their fingers and hoping the snow never comes.

In winter, Riverdale Park hosts the pretty spectacle of kids hurtling down hills on impromptu cardboard tobagans. Only problem is it leaves a mess the city isn't willing to clean up.

By:Noah Richler Published on Sat Oct 26 2013

Sometime after Halloween, the City of Toronto will put a sign at the top of the steps leading from the top of the Cabbagetown side of Riverdale Park, and another at the path leading from the end of Spruce Street towards the farm, warning that the walkways will not be cleared of snow and ice and pedestrians make their way at their peril. City planners will cross their fingers and hope for no snow and, when it comes, send out big graders and trucks with inefficient plans alongside bobcats with makeshift wooden plows to push around the white stuff pointlessly. Truly, Toronto snow clearing is a farce.

Nevertheless, the park’s human traffic will continue during the winter months. Men and women, young and old, will continue to walk their dogs or to amble for the pleasure of it. Joggers will persist in making their way down the approximately 100 steps and through the bowl and across the pedestrian bridge that spans the Don River and the DVP and links Cabbagetown with the eastern side of the park and Riverdale, or down more steps and along the trails of the Valley itself. Commuters will continue to walk across the footbridge, icy as it will become.

In Montreal, Québec City, Edmonton, Saskatoon or Ottawa, to pick just a few Canadian cities, winter is an accepted, relished fact. Paths, waterways and steps are a part of the culture and used day and night by citizens wanting to avail themselves of winter’s particular pleasures. Come November, Montreal does not bar its population from climbing the multitudinous wooden steps leading up from Outremont and Westmount through Fredrick Law Olmsted’s wonderful Mount Royal Park. Saskatoon and Edmonton do not block their riversides, and Quebec City does not, as Toronto City Council spoilers would, refuse to clear its wooden boardwalks.

But in Toronto, it does not even take winter for the city council and its reluctant Parks, Forestry and Recreation services to behave like Scrooges. In the 15 years that I have lived in Cabbagetown (and I see in Riverdale Park an emblem of what is happening across the GTA), I have watched as progressively fewer garbage bins have been maintained in the park and all of them removed from the Don Valley trails as if to spite the people that use them. The water fountains have gone, and the asphalt paths have sunk below the level of the grass of the Riverdale Park bowl that becomes a flood plain in winter, making long stretches of the used route impassable.

And yet just as, in summer, the park becomes a glorious display of Canadian origins in the sports that people play – baseball, cricket, football, ultimate Frisbee, soccer, etc. – in December and January, the children of both long-settled and recent Canadians, in their tuques and turbans and headscarves, will gather to slide down the park’s banks on store-bought toboggans or impromptu ones made of cardboard. And then, to do it again, they will rush back up the steps and the compacted snow that the City of Toronto wishes would just go away.

This is a pretty scene at first but messy afterwards. Cardboard and trash will be left to be picked up by anonymous citizens who have been placing blue recycling bags and cardboard boxes with bin liners along the Don Valley trails. Some jogger will again build a small bridge of branches to forge a dry route through the muddy expanses. Lynn Dionne and Anne Pastuzak, two stellar citizens in this part of the city who have worked creatively and exhaustively for four years to prod parks supervisors into doing something, will keep at it, though there’s only so much citizens can do when legal liability appears to be the city’s only motivator. The park will become a slushy morass. The trails will be lined with litter.

Years ago, the Canadian Malcolm Gladwell wrote an influential essay describing New York City in miserable decline and the straightforward realization that its turnaround depended upon: for the boroughs to be tidy, the city itself needed to set an example.

Put the trash bins back. Clean the steps. Clean the paths. We have the staff and the resources, for this is not a budget issue but one of will. Show it, and others will do the same. And let’s use our imaginations: if, for instance, we cannot at the moment afford to repair the asphalt paths that become small lakes in winter, then put wooden walkways over the puddly bits – as, in Italy, Venetians do. As the city council appears so perennially incapable of grand plans, let’s win back this city’s charms by increments. Make a virtue of Riverdale Park and, in time, the whole system of ravines. Accept that winter is a certainty and embrace it.

Noah Richler has an archaeologist's interest in trash but still resents it. He has written about Toronto's ravines in his prize-winning book about Canada, This is My Country, What's Yours?

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